Development of an extensible engineering support tool for IEC 61499 considering WYSIWYG GUI building as example

In today's production and assembly processes, conventional PLC-based architectures are state-of-the-art for control engineering and application design. These kinds of architectures cause high costs for engineering and maintenance, especially adaptation of applications and hardware modifications create intolerable overhead. Distributed automation systems built of mechatronic components help coping with the demands of modern markets. The paper presents a new architecture for integrated modeling of such systems, introducing different views for domain experts. A modular engineering support tool based on an open tool integration platform is developed, using IEC 61499 as common data model.